The Google Library

Benchmark: a standard by which something can be measured or judged.  [1]

Organizing the World's Information

As the world continues to become more and more digital, it is not surprising that one of the biggest players in the digital market would start looking to new venues for information organization and access. Google announced on December 14, 2004 that it would form a partnership with Stanford University, the University of Michigan, Harvard University, the New York Public Library and Oxford University's Bodleian Library "to digitally scan books from their collections so that users worldwide can search them in Google."  [2]

Size and Scope of the Project

This project is an enormous undertaking. According to one source referenced below, the number of projected items is

• Stanford University: all eight million volumes
• University of Michigan: all seven million volumes
• Harvard University: pilot of 40,000, out of 1.5 million
• New York Public Library: pilot, expand to 20 million items
• Oxford's Bodleian Library: one million public domain volumes.  [3]

This would suggest that over the course of the next several years Google and these libraries will scan and digitize over 36 million volumes. Even if each volume were 100 pages long this would be an extraordinary undertaking, costly in time, talents, and funds. Google and several of the sites have stated that books will not be damaged and, in fact, will not be scanned if they are too fragile to undergo the process. There have also been assurances that books will be returned to the shelves of their home libraries after this process.  [4] This will be an interesting exercise in bibliographic control. Inevitably there will be duplication across the libraries. Google will either pay for multiple scannings of the same work or staff will spend time deciding if works are indeed identical.

Books that are in the public domain will be scanned in their entirety. Volumes that are copyrighted will have sections scanned for public access while not infringing upon copyright restrictions. One would expect that when a volume becomes public domain it will then become available in its entirety. The legal mechanisms of creating partnerships with these libraries, assuring copyright compliance, and allowing access to the volumes during the process have been negotiated with the member libraries.  [5]

Stakeholders in the Process

As with all projects of this size and scope, there are several stakeholder groups that will be affected by the Google Library. Users, writers, publishers, and Google with its investors all have a very strong interest in this undertaking. Libraries and librarians will also be prominent members of this group.

And Historians

Since this journal is primarily a venue for historians and computing (along with archivists and information specialists), it is worth thinking about the effects that such a digital library will have on academic historians, on their students, and on historical scholarship in general.

There are a variety of ways in which this project will enhance the ability of historians to use information. Naturally, not everything on the World Wide Web is particularly relevant to historians, and this project in no way gives access to unique items that are stored in worldwide archives. Nonetheless, for those volumes that do have relevance to historians, and that are included in this project, there will be great benefits in digitization.

Academic historians are notoriously short on travel dollars. The World Wide Web and digital scanning have great potential for making materials available to scholars at their desks. This is access to content and it will be greatly enhanced by making worldwide collections available online. It will be possible to look at the contents of a volume and decide if it contains critical information for the researcher.

In the past one could always order a book through interlibrary loan if it appeared to be pertinent to one's research. This took time and cost the university library a fairly steep fee. In some cases the book was too old to travel. Now scholars will be able to look at contents and see if it is worth spending dollars to travel to the book or if interlibrary loan will yield a really important monograph.

Students of history, who need to read history in order to study it, will probably find this resource of even greater value than their professors. They have even less money and less travel time. They are also less likely to require that they hold the actual book in their hands and will be happy for a searchable digital equivalent for the work.

A critically important aspect of this digitization project is that book text will be searchable in a way that was not the case before. Scholars will be able to look for instances of particular words, phrases or patterns of writing in individual texts, not through time-consuming reading and highlighting, but through content-analysis software (e.g., Atlas.ti or Nudist) that streamlines the process. In digitizing these materials Google will change the way that they can be accessed at the word-by-word level.

The Downside and the Foreseeable Future

This is an extraordinary partnership on the part of Google and these five libraries. It would appear that it is a win-win situation in which all stakeholders will benefit from the project. There have been some negative reactions nonetheless. Barbara Quint's Information Today article of December 27, 2004 is an excellent summary of issues surrounding the Google Library.  [12] Michael Gorman, dean of library services at California State University, Fresno, and president-elect of the American Library Association, had little good to say about the project in his December 20, 2004 Newsday article.  [13] Among other things, Gorman questions our desire to read a 500 page book online, or our desire to print out 500 unbound pages. He states that context is part of knowledge so that a snippet from page 250 will not be sufficient if one is interested in a particular topic. (In fact he believes that dictionaries and encyclopedias are good online candidates exactly because they lend themselves to short bits of information.) Finally, and this appeals to the librarian in me, he wonders about how these volumes will be indexed. Will one put in a search term and end up with so many hits that the really crucial volume will be lost in the wash of all the others? In the end Gorman and I agree that libraries are not going away. We also agree that scholars will need to consult books in their paper form for the foreseeable future. Historians will benefit from these digitized sources insofar as they can solve important information problems with them. For the rest of the time it will probably be business as usual.

Notes

Dates for each citation are for the copyright or issue date for that particular item. All items were accessed and live on 10 January 2005.

1. "Benchmark," American Heritage Dictionary, 4th ed., 2000.

2. "Google Checks Out Library Books," (2004), http://www.google.com/press/pressrel/print_library.html

3. Aaron Swartz, "Google Weblog," December 19, 2004, http://google.blogspace.com/archives/001493 Readers are advised that these numbers were presented on this web site with links to the five library sites and their press releases. In the case of Stanford, the press release stated, "digitizing hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of books from the shelves of Stanford libraries and making them available to readers worldwide and without charge." http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/2004/pr-google-011205.html. Swarts lists the following press release web sites;

• Stanford: http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/2004/pr-google-011205.html
• University of Michigan: http://www.umich.edu/news/index.html?Releases/2004/Dec04/library/index
• Harvard: http://hul.harvard.edu/publications/041213letter.html
• New York Public Library: http://www.nypl.org/press/google.cfm
• Oxford, Bodleian Library: http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/news/news58.htm

4. "FAQ: The University's Pilot Project with Google," (December 13, 2004), http://hul.harvard.edu/publications/041213faq.html . One of Google's websites states, "No library books were harmed during the making of these digital copies." (2004), http://print.google.com/googleprint/library.html

5. See the press releases of the five participating libraries for statements on their negotiations and agreements with Google. Oxford, in particular, goes into the details of the "Oxford-Google Digitisation Agreement" at http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/news/news58.htm

6. "Google Print and Publishers," (2004), http://print.google.com/googleprint/library.html

7. "Stephen King offers serial novel over Internet," (July 24, 2000), http://archives.cnn.com/2000/books/news/07/24/stephenking.internet.ap/

8. "Google: Be a Little Evil," Technology Review 108 (1: January 2005): 15-16 notes that Google collected 1.67 billion dollars from investors on its first day of public offering.

9. "Investor Relations," (2005), http://investor.google.com/

10. Charles H. Ferguson. "What's Next for Google?" Technology Review 108 (1: January 2005): 38-46.

11. "Google' Partnership with Libraries," (2004), http://print.google.com/googleprint/library.html

12. Barbara Quint. "Googles' Library Project: Questions, Questions, Questions," (December 27, 2004), http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks/nb041227-2.shtml

13. Michael Gorman. "Google Library Plan: A Miss Not a Hit," Newsday (December 20, 2004), http://www.newsday.com/news/opinion/...